this is an extension of this post. It is extremely hard to keep iCloud use within 200gb with the increasing amount of photos take from iphone. Hence I am thinking of cutting off icloud photo sync. Same for Google photos.
I was thinking whether it is possible to not use Apple and Googe Photos (same issue with their Google One pricing), but use other 3rd photo app to sync and share with others. I could use Synology Photos (absolutely free if your photos are on Synology NAS) or Mylio (not free for premium)
Just wondering others have gone down this path and their experience.
One of my hobbies is photography. I take lots of photos. With a variety of cameras. Including my iPhone.
I keep almost none of them on my iPhone. I do not use Photos on my Mac.
My workflow is that I take the photos, off load them to my Mac (you may have seen my Photo Ingest Bunch ). Review them and delate most, keep only the best. And then save them to multiple places:
Local working drive.
Local backup drive.
Backblaze.
And finally I have a SmugMug account where I upload those I want to have available via the web and share with others.
I have a basic SmugMug account, $75 per year. I just checked and I have over 12 thousand images and videos uploaded to my SmugMug account. I’ve been using them since they started and am very happy with the service.
I just discovered that I can use iDrive Photos for backup. Idrive has very aggressive pricing for the first year (i.e. $4 for 10Tb for first year). I am trialling this now. If satisfactory, I may turn off iCloud sync for photos
photos are backup to the same idrive account. Yesterday I spent around 4 hours backuping all photos on my iphone , around 4000 photos. Now I can see them all on the idrive
I think so - I have iCloud Photos off on my phone (but do have it on my iPad and Mac). I don’t want all my photos ever being on the phone, but I do use the 200GB package as an offsite “backup” (as it’s sync, it’s not strictly backup but it covers the loss of a hard drive or robbery situation).
I use PhotoSync, which runs in the background and can upload my photos to a location I want (SFTP, Onedrive, Dropbox, SMB share etc etc) and then I can do with them what I want.
Generally then I copy them in to Photos on the Mac but also store a copy outside Photos.
I do not keep any photos on iCloud or Google at all. For my iOS photos I use Photosync to sync them to my mac when I arrive back home and I clear them out.
Me too, only a few cmaeras but lots of photos.And like @MevetS I do the processin on the mac and save to multiple places, Synology NAS, multiple backips nightly and monthly.
For sharing I put only the curated photos up on Google drive if I have to share a fw with outsiders but my husband has access to the Synology and can get the photos there.
I have three cameras (including my iPhone) and don’t use either iCloud Photos or Google Photos. All my photos, including the ones on my iPhone, end up in my Lightroom library, which lives on an external hard drive that’s backed up via Backblaze. Since I’m very selective about the photos I put on my iPhone and iPad (ahem … as often as not they’ve been taken using one of my other cameras), never sync my photos between my devices, and don’t share photos routinely, I don’t really need the syncing and sharing functionality iCloud Photos and similar services offer—and I’m probably an outlier in this regard.
I don’t use a third party app to transfer my photos from my iPhone to the drive where my photos are stored. I use the Image Capture app bundled into macOS. If I need to get my photos off my phone and into the cloud—i.e., if I’m traveling or won’t be near my desktop anytime soon—I just send them to Dropbox right from whatever photo app I’m using (usually Halide).
). Review them and delate most, keep only the best. And then save them to multiple places: